Stras­bourg 1518

It’s hard to recall a plug sock­et look­ing more pro­found and sculp­ture-like than in this extra­or­di­nary new short work by Jonathan Glaz­er, a tran­scen­dent 10-minute slam-down inspired by a bout of invol­un­tary terp­si­chore­an mania in the French bor­der city of Stras­bourg some 500 years ago.

These banal-look­ing sock­ets are the worka­day piece of found pro­duc­tion design that link togeth­er the dim, cell-like abodes of the var­i­ous col­lect­ed mod­ern dancers as they unleash their lost souls in a jud­der­ing, con­vuls­ing swirl of pent-up and some­times con­fused (but always deeply mov­ing) fury. There are no plugs in the sock­ets, because these humans are bat­ter­ies run­ning at full pow­er, with fizzing elec­tric­i­ty cours­ing to the tip of every fly­ing fin­ger and high-kick­ing toe.

On the sound­track is an indus­tri­al break­beat track by Mica Levi which pounds like an out-of-con­trol jack­ham­mer, and the dancers each respond in unique ways to its abra­sive, propul­sive din. The film offers a sub­tle com­men­tary on the cap­tiv­i­ty of Covid and the nature of mankind as an irre­press­ible phys­i­cal being.

It affirms the poten­tial of the human body as a liv­ing, breath­ing work of art in its own right, and stands as a paean to those who are able to mas­ter, con­trol and manip­u­late their bod­ies in such a high­ly expres­sive fashion.

Each dancer is set against an ugly, sin­gle-coloured back­drop in what looks like a declut­tered bed­sit, lit with either a sin­gle lamp or sun­light stream­ing through a win­dow. The per­for­mances have been cap­tured mul­ti­ple times across a long stretch of the day, so a cut might con­nect between one dancer dur­ing the day, and the same one, doing the same dance, at night.

These flick­er­ing lights con­nect­ed by sud­den ellip­ti­cal edits sig­nal the rapid, inex­orable march of time, the time we have wast­ed and the time we have enjoyed, and they offer a melan­cholic coun­ter­point to the ecsta­t­ic dynamism of the dances themselves.

It might be tempt­ing to see the film as sim­i­lar to a music pro­mo – in an extreme­ly round-about way, it remind­ed me ini­tial­ly of the video for Phar­rell Williams’ ​‘Hap­py’, in which hard cuts form a daisy chain of impos­si­bly sun­ny dancers bop­ping along the byways of Los Angeles.

Yet for­mal­ly and tonal­ly this is a very dif­fer­ent beast, a machine-tooled emo­tion­al tour de force which stands as a gid­dy, breath-snatch­ing ode to the rev­o­lu­tion­ary aspect of being alive and being alone. And this would’ve worked as a full fea­ture – 10 min­utes is but a mere morsel of such greatness.